Spammers

[fishketcha]

Michael,

I may be wrong and I apologize if I am but I do believe that list member "erurdylouri” has bad intensions and needs to be removed.

Wayne

[eclecticguy]

Yes he is. I try to keep on top of these. Seems like there are at least 2 every day. They always target the same forum too - the "Other FIshing-related Stuff" forum. I find that very odd. It is almost like there is a list out there telling spammers "hey , go post on this forum". Maybe there is!

Anyway, users do have to register and acknowledge the registration email that goes out. So, these are people that are doing this and for what? 53 members. If it continues, my only recourse is to personally check all registration requests and grant them manually. This forum software supports that but it is a pain for everyone.

cheers,
Michael

[fishketcha]

Michael,

It may be in your best interest to "personally check all registration requests and grant them manually" now. I had another spam email today on another board. I've seen this wipe out another forum, and I have seen very good assests leave other boards. You have a great thing going here and I would hate to see it trashed.

Wayne

[eclecticguy]

Good point Wayne. I'll set it up now.

thanks,
Michael

[eclecticguy]

Ok, I now have registrations set up so I have to accept them. That should eliminate the spamming all together.

thanks,
Michael

[eclecticguy]

Well, I have been using the manual activation to prevent spammers and that seems to be working well. Anyone who had to go through the activation process, I would be interested in your feedback. As part of figuring out how to deal with spammers, I did find a lot of information about putting special informational fields on the registration form that prevents bots and usually spammers too. Given the pattern for how posts were always made to the same forum, I think a bot was up to no good. I have stopped 8 attempts already! I am going to try this for a week and if the # of bot attempts goes down, remove the administrator approval and see if the custom fields alone will work. That seems to be what most sites do.

regards,
Michael

[gmreeves]

I'm not sure if I made the SPAMMER registration cutoff or not but I thought registration was painless. I was approved a few minutes after signing up and didn't have any problems.

[eclecticguy]

That's good to hear! You were one of the "new & improved" registrations that requires admin approval. So it is good to hear that it was not too painful.

Cheers,
Michael

[fishketcha]

Thank you Michael... for taking the extra measures to make this site as secure as possible.

Wayne